[FM Discuss] notes from Tuesday's Booki discussion

[Martin Kean]

Booki discussion
Tuesday morning 3 March 2009

Present: Adam, Patrick, David, Martin, Aco, Douglas, Andy

improve the chat
FLOSSmanuals read write and remix – basic functions
Also language trees -standalone installations of Twiki
Translate -English not the default source
Store in language communities
Translattion contributions very popular right now, the most active part
of FLOSSmanuals in terms of contributions
Other book services available in FLOSSmanuals
Glossary, snippets and ‘what is’ not fully utilised right now
Remix -drag and drop -could be an output chain, generate PDF
Objavi, PDF generator, Python and Pisa, using CSS
Used Scribus but it was clunky
OBJAVI not friendly, need preview, dynamic, could record styles maybe as
template
Booki -somewhere people can make books
Index -use arrange
Booki -should be able to define the workflow process in any project
WYSIWYG – too many options might put people off
So solve simple problems in simple ways -WYSIWYM
Use WYMeditor
Can show CSS
Use Xena?
Interactions via chat and notifications – very useful to see who and
how
many are contributing, adds camaraderie, but needs improvement, develop
an IRC gateway interface, but needs to be persistent across chapters,
and make it more useable, so make IRC like a history? Add timestamps?
IRC adds earning cred with old skool, branding and alliance
Douglas- server one IRC user, but won’t look like one IRC user
Change the Write page -complete
Word count for each chapter? – Andy
Statistics page? -Douglas
Dedicated page for the Chat history? -Patrick
Markup conventions, timestamps
Shoould conventions be done differently? -Janet
Not everyone will be intersted enough to look at it
Different tools for different projects? Sprint vs usuals write
To do list
Check images
Booksprint specific tools
Contributor List (is up to 390)
How to associate Booki projects within a domain? -Adam
Shoould be one repository – Douglas
Multiple instances -Aco
Backup etc outside the database -Aco
Unique ids in Django -Aco
Advantage of database -realtime backups and replication, lock files,
generate PDFs apart from db, need something easy to scale
Need to sync database if you are offline
Booki -a collection of texts
Relational database  - PostGress
Full text searching -Sphinx? Woosh?

User pages -need to made more useful

Lists all manuals you have contributed to
Should list rights access
Show activity, subscribe to other manulas
Social networking, dashboard, set preferences for WYSIWYG editor
Send to do lists to user page?
CV page
Ohohh.net
FLOSSmanuals needs to push the bookstore widget
We can use the same widget in Booki
Remix -making books across domains, uses url, but not using a wiki
anymore
Twiki -uses variables

Booki
to help people collaboratively write books online
creating new category of softeware
it will solve FM future requirements
so an open source book wiki
so be a project creator for booki projects
registered NGObooks.net
can be as big as we want to make it
could attach multimedia to books?

Booki functional brief
Booki core - read / write / remix
Which content can be remixed? Licence issues, languagesâ€|
Project is a book or an edition of a book, or a remix of a project
Sets of chapters, creating the blessed flag
Books of proprietrty software
If its too easy to embed manual in a web page, licence issues?
Solve the simple architecture problems right now

Javascript tasks
OBLAVI
Preview for PDF generation, type size, line spacing, typeface list,
bold, column width, subheads,
CSS style options / in dynamic form, type
Typeface issues - how to choose a nice font?
Generates a variable with all CSS stylesheet embedded
Dropdown that shows CSS , to check it

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